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Speednames Domain Registrar – they charge for Everything

We recently completed a website project for a customer and needed to update the domain’s names servers to use CloudFlare – a fairly standard operation.

My lead web developer came back to saying that he couldn’t make the change as the registrar was asking for credit card details.

Baffled, I began to investigate and was absolutely horrified to find that for a simple nameserver change (not adding a DNS service, just pointing it somewhere else), they wanted to charge the customer an undetermined amount (the message simply says: “We cannot place your order while there is no active card on the account”).

We then decided, screw this, we’re going to transfer the domain name away. We attempted to change the admin and registrant email address and – guess what – there’s a £17.10 charge ($22!) to update the contact email addresses!

Needless to say, I cannot recommend this registrar to anyone. I would also recommend that anyone using them moves away because a company as unscrupulous as this could hike their charges at any point.

We’ll add the details of their various charges as we find them below:

Activity

Charge (GBP)

Charge (USD)

Contact Details Update

£17.10

$22.15

Who Are Speednames

It seems Speednames are actually the dirty little secret of ‘Netnames’ – when I called Netnames and spoke to a guy there, he claimed they were seperate entities and that he’d have to transfer me (and then hung up), the next time I called the same number, the guy that answered said it was Speednames! All very suspect.

Contacting Speednames

The phone number listed on the speednames.uk website no longer works (I bet it took a hammering) so I called their parent company Netnames’ Support on +44 20 7015 9200 and got through that way.

One comment on “Speednames Domain Registrar – they charge for Everything”

Hi Bob, thanks for the article. Phone number ends up at same unanswered line. They have taken my money but not renewed my domain address and Emails to my address bounce back too. My business is literally failing in front of me, I have probably sent 30 emails and had one answer from a human – which told me to log into the portal. My password doesn’t work and any password change can’t make it to me because email not working!! Am I a hostage now, feeling completely helpless, any ideas please? Crispin